Anthony Pugh said his cousin admitted writing Ducsay a threatening letter from prison. He said Matthew Pugh was angry after Ducsay told prison officials about the letter and he was disciplined.

"He said he was upset because he was kept in jail longer," Anthony Pugh testified. "He said he wanted to f--- her up for what she did."

Anthony Pugh said his cousin said he planned to "use things from work" to "make sure no evidence got left there."

Ducsay's badly beaten body was discovered by her mother in the basement bedroom of her Milford home in May 2006. Matthew Pugh and Ducsay had dated since she was a teen, but the relationship ended when Pugh went to prison after drug convictions, family members have testified.

An autopsy showed Ducsay died of multiple blunt force trauma injuries to her head and stab wounds.

If convicted of charges of murder and first-degree burglary, Matthew Pugh, 42, of Hamden, faces a maximum of 80 years in prison.

Matthew Pugh rocked back and forth in a chair at the defense table, watching his cousin testify. Anthony did not appear to make eye contact with him, struggling to look his way even when Lawlor asked him at the beginning of his testimony to identify his relative.

Anthony Pugh admitted that he was not completely upfront with police when he was first questioned. Though the cousins had falling-outs through the years, Matthew was still his cousin. Their fathers are brothers.

He said he also "didn't want to get involved."

But Anthony Pugh said his wife and his boss told him "to do the right thing," he said, "And that's what I did."

He said he also thought that if anything bad had happened to anyone in his family, he said he would want all witnesses to tell what they knew.

Last week, a state police detective testified that he found two key pieces of evidence at the crime scene, a knife blade without a handle and a piece of black tape.

According to court records, the 1 1/2 -inch-wide piece of black vinyl tape, found on Ducsay's left cheek, was unique.

The tape was sold only to three local customers, including Chromalloy, a manufacturing company in Windsor where both Matthew Pugh and Anthony Pugh had worked overhauling airplane engine parts.

Police did not find a roll of the tape inside the Ducsay home. But Frank Gall Jr., a former Milford detective, testified last week that he found a wad of the tape, which he identified as Permacel, inside a wastebasket in the basement of Pugh's home in Hamden during a May 26, 2006, search there.

Gall said he found a roll of the tape and a lint brush with the tape rolled around it in Pugh's home, as well.

On Wednesday, Charise Trotman, the woman who lived with Pugh in Hamden in 2006, and her daughter, Chamira, both testified that they did not recall seeing the black tape there.

In other testimony Wednesday, Nelson Garcia, a retired major with the state Department of Correction, told jurors that Pugh admitted writing a threatening letter to Ducsay from prison.

Prosecutors offered the letter as evidence. The judge's clerk read the letter — angry in tone and laced with profanity, vulgarity and racial slurs — quickly in open court.

The letter warned Ducsay that she needed to visit him at the prison and to "make time" for him or he would tell her bosses at the bank and family members about suggestive letters Pugh said she wrote and send them provocative photos of her.

"I will destroy your reputation if you try and hide from me," the clerk read from the letter. If she didn't visit him in prison, Pugh wrote, he would make her "life a miserable, living hell."